Digital marketing is a great new way to reach potential customers, but it can be expensive and hard to manage at times. Find out how to make the most out of your budget with these affordable, effective dealership digital marketing techniques.

1. Do your research
Before you can have a highly successful digital marketing campaign, you need to know your stuff. You should be up-to-date on the latest trends in your industry. Your target market should be determined and defined. Your business should take inventory of your current digital marketing efforts and how effective they are. Once you know about your industry, your target market, and your past successes with marketing, you should set some new goals for the future. Without these things, it would be difficult to succeed with any marketing plan your business comes up with.

2. Social Media/Blogging
Social media is a great way to reach potential customers and get live feedback from customers. You can easily promote your business and post information about what’s happening. Be careful not to make accounts on so many social media sites that you can’t maintain them. It’s important to interact with your followers and answer their questions promptly on all social media platforms. A/B testing can be helpful on social media platforms to see what types of posts people respond best to. Your business should take advantage of tools that measure effectiveness of different posts. Once you find out what your followers want to see/learn about, it’s easier to cater to them. Then, you can create helpful blog posts with relevant information that they actually want to read. You might also learn whether videos, infographics, blog posts, pictures, or newsletters are the most popular among your audience. All of your information should be focused towards your target market.

Blogging can be beneficial for both you and your followers. It can increase traffic to your website and lead visitors to other pages on your site while giving potential customers the information that they want to read. That sounds like a pretty great way to gain brand awareness. However, be cautious about your blog content. You don’t want to create content just to gain awareness. If your blog articles aren’t high quality, relevant, and full of valuable information, you might not get the positive results you’re looking for. Routinely posting new content for customers will bring them back to your site and remind them of your business. Blogging can be a very useful tool to provide information to your target market and promote your business. The best part? It’s free if you do it yourself!

3. Other free digital marketing techniques
There are several business directories that will let you post a listing for free. If you can find them and maintain accuracy with your NAP (Name, Address, and Phone), they can be a great way for businesses to improve their online presence. Some sites will charge a small fee to manage your free listings for you. This can help free up time if you have room for this expense in your budget.

Three of the most common ways to utilize digital marketing include content management, social media marketing, and search engine optimization. We already discussed blogging and SMM, so now it’s time for SEO. You can use SEO to customize your headlines and descriptions to attract the most website traffic. Making backlinks to your site and using relevant keywords also increases your rank on search engine response pages.

Sometimes all you need to do is call your audience to action or find an influencer to associate your brand with. If you decide to find an influencer, make sure to choose wisely before you get your brand’s image attached to that person. If you write a weekly, biweekly, or monthly newsletter, ask customers to sign up for an email containing current information on your company. This provides your business with emails from your target audience and gives them a regular interaction with your business. Email marketing is still one of the most cost-effective forms of digital marketing. Request your loyal customers to write a positive review about your business. If customers are unhappy, ask them to share recommendations for your company to improve.

4. Choose your ads wisely
If you want to dedicate a small budget to digital marketing, there are some options that can focus on your target market to get the best results. For example, mobile ads are less expensive than ads on tablets and PC’s. Purchasing flex ads on Facebook can target people that have 2 or more characteristics chosen by your company. You can purchase ads on Instagram without having an account which helps businesses appeal to customers’ love of visual ads. Bing ads are much more affordable than Google, and they still have a good reach. If you’re a new business, you should focus on the marketing and ad techniques that convert into sales and have a high ROI while you’re starting out. After that, you can focus more on brand awareness. The goal is to find digital marketing channels that focus on your target market and result in the best outcomes for your company for an affordable price.